History of Brooklyn

Brooklyn was a largely African-American neighborhood which emerged in uptown Charlotte, North Carolina at the turn of the 20th century. According to former Brooklyn visitor Mr. James Ross, it housed a thriving community complete with “two movie theaters, a library, two funeral homes, two colleges, a high school, an elementary school, probably six night clubs, probably twenty restaurants, an Elks Club, a YMCA, a YWCA, two commercial laundries, a commercial icehouse, twenty-three churches big enough for people to remember and probably another ten little storefront churches, a pharmacy, doctors, dentists, two newspapers, now this was one neighborhood.” Named after its sister city in New York, “Brooklyn” conveyed the sense of a city within a city, one with an equally vibrant nightlife and community-spirit. The decline of this community began in the late 1930s when federal guidelines red-lined African American communities and the all-white Charlotte Planning Commission re-zoned Brooklyn in 1947 as an industrial zone. Difficulty in obtaining property loans and re-zoning discouraged capital investment and precipitated Brooklyn’s economic decline. By the 1960s Brooklyn’s growing impoverishment, as well as its prime location in uptown, led Charlotte’s Redevelopment Authority to target Brooklyn as its first urban renewal project. Between 1960 and 1977, over 1000 families, 200 businesses, and numerous social institutions of this African-American neighborhood were removed or destroyed. In its place came new government buildings, a city park, thoroughfares, and private office space in what is now known as Second Ward. No new residential or commercial structures were built to replace those that had been bulldozed, leaving residents and businesses of the former Brooklyn community to find new accommodations elsewhere. While many people moved into the neighborhoods of Biddleville, Belmont, Villa Heights, Washington Heights, Wesley Heights, and Wilmore, many Brooklyn businesses never reopened. (information for this summary is drawn largely from Thomas Hanchett’s, Sorting Out the New South City (1999))